jc blog - tales of a modern-day nomadic hunter-gatherer

This is the weblog of Intrepid Wanderer. You never know what you
might find here;
graphic descriptions of bodily functions, computer programming secrets,
proselytizing for the antichrist, miscellaneous ranting and kvetching,
valuable information on living off the land...
if you don't share my rather weird interests you may want to try
slashdot instead.

If you want to comment on anything you see here, try the new Facebook comments,
reachable by clicking the "[comment]" link at the end of each post.
If for some reason that isn't working, go ahead and email me,
jc.unternet.net. You know what to do with the first dot. Make the 'subject'
line something reasonably intelligent-looking or it goes plunk! into the
spambasket unread.

This RSS feed may or may not work. Haven't fiddled with it in forever.

this has been said already many different ways, but AFAIK this is uniquely my
own: if you don't trust me with guns, I don't trust you with power. this is
for you, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, Jared Huffman, and everybody else
wielding political power including Petaluma's Mayor David Glass. all wannabe
tyrants want a disarmed populace, and though I'm not going to "affirm the
consequent" I am going to assume the consequent rather than have to
assume the position.
[comment]

the Ethereum blog is where the ideas
presented in the whitepaper are being fleshed out and expanded upon. testnet
launches tomorrow, maybe time to expend a few neurons towards understanding
this new innovation.
[comment]

trying to get an idea of how my scrypt mining script speed relates to bogomips
and to benchmarks at cpubenchmark.net. answer: not so much. I get anywhere from 15.4 hashes per second per benchmark-rating on my netbook with an Atom N2800 (benchmark 651) to 39.8 with
an Athlon X2 Dual Core 5600+. so I guess the only real way to know how it
will perform on a certain CPU is to try it. and the cheapest way I know to do
that is with the Amazon cloud, if indeed it emulates the CPU speeds reliably.

found a different amaranth growing in the
dunes of the El Mogote peninsula yesterday.
leaves look similar to those of the
species that grows along the roads, but
thicker and maybe more bitter.
[comment]

walked into the desert north of town again, looking for 3 things: a place to
nap, the lush green area I noticed last time, and a damiana plant. the first
was relatively easy: in a place with lots of discarded tires and other junk,
I put a small tire inside a huge tire, and threw a cracked plastic cistern
cover on top of that: instant recliner, stuck of course in the reclined
position. the green area was nowhere to be seen: probably it dried up in the
interim. no sight of the mysterious damiana either. but I did catch a
Passiflora in bloom. should post the photo to Facebook later.

on the way out, I saw the start of a trail, formed naturally by sandstone,
and followed it up and along the hillside for a half mile or so. there was some chainfruit cholla, and
I rubbed the spines of a fruit off in my hands and ate it. on the way back
along the malecon I saw a couple of large eels as I approached the molinito, and a ways past that was a young Mexigeek with a hexicopter. he was
going to give it one more flight but both his battery packs were low.

sitting in Cafe Gourmet now, having spent about 20 of my last 60 pesos on
coffee. hope I start making some real money again soon.
[comment]

namespacing the Javascript sCrypt code I found in the wild pummelled the
performance: 23 seconds vs 9 in the worst test case. wtf? now have to retrace
my steps to see what exactly is the culprit.
[comment]

finally have myself a battery monitor so I don't get shutdown hard when my
power comes unplugged. it's 85 lines of python but about 100K of icon images
(yuck) on top of the bloated wxPython framework. someday I might learn enough
about GUI programming to do it right, with no icon files and only using
Xlib; but probably not.
[comment]

had a weird dream last night. I time-traveled to the City of the Sun sometime
in the early days. M was there, and he had a headful of brown kinky hair then.
N was also there, inexplicably. I'm going to refer to their "dream" entities
as DM and DN, and myself in the dream as DJ. well, DJ and DN went to see DM
because he had just done his first of two major bombings (at least that's
what I think it was) of one of the properties there, and DJ had gone back in
time to ask him why. DJ worried that he might run into me, which was also
inexplicable because I didn't go there for the first time until 2004 or so.
anyway, DJ expected DM to just tell him to stuff it, but instead DM told him
everything, most of which I've forgotten, but I do remember he said there
was a lot of lead in the water. he said he had extracted enough of
the lead to build two something-or-others. the city knew about the lead but
only told people about the arsenic. anyway, and to me this was the key part
of the dream, he also said there was some kind of citizens' response team
organized and that when things all fell apart we would need to take over.
DJ felt like he understood what he was talking about and that he'd find this
grassroots organization and be welcomed into it. I'm not so sure. but if it
doesn't exist, maybe I'll start one.
[comment]

so Ixam host refunded most of my money. good on them. PaulVPS is still pretending that I'm imagining my CPU slowdown. could be they really don't know. but I
guess I'll have to go full dedicated. whatever happened to blade servers?
they used to be pretty cheap.
[comment]

freaking finally got coinyecoin compiled on a fascist CentOS system, using
instructions at bitcointalk.org and
the command LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/lib" make -f makefile.unix. and
I have to run it using LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib ./coinyecoind.
[comment]

so PaulVPS is taking its sweet time fixing the slow virtual CPU problems in my
two servers with them. they seem to have deliberately misunderstood it as a
network problem when I specifically told them what was wrong.

and Ixam never emailed me to let me know my server was ready. I had to log into
their site to find out.

this is what happens when you use the bottom-of-the-barrel companies with the
lowest rates, I know. but it doesn't stop me from bitching.
[comment]

I posted some inaccurate information, I believe it was on Facebook, some time
ago and recently learned my mistake. bitcoin transactions don't have
a minimum transaction fee unless they're below a certain threshold
for what's called "dust" and are assessed a penalty. that threshold, as I
recall, is somewhere around BTC.00057 or so. so as long as you spend at least
that amount, about 50 cents US as of this post, you can supposedly do so
with zero fees. I don't have that amount to spend to test this, but can
verify that I've made some zero-fee transactions with americancoin and
dogecoin.
[comment]

on awakening, a voice in my head -- my voice, I believe -- was singing Happy
Birthday to me. weird. the motorcycle ride to
Bangor in 1976? the Moonies in '77? no
idea. my blog doesn't go back that far.
[comment]

trimmed the fan palm, and on a whim tried one of the spiny branches as a
hair brush, since the Chinese-made one I bought at Waldo's for about 2 bucks
is already half destroyed after about a month. it works! and I have enough for
maybe 3 years even if the thorns break off fairly quickly.
[comment]

earlier tonight, Chris Lyspooner made the
statement "Voting is an act that supports individuals using a facade of special powers to write legislation to use guns to take away my rights . Why do you want to point a gun at my head asshole ?"

I feel that this is accurate most of the time. however, in some (perhaps all)
states and localities, there are ballot initiatives to undo such
mistakes, such as the recent recalls of anti-gun legislators in Colorado,
and a chance to vote against new taxes, as has happened several times since I moved to Sonoma County, California. I also believe that a candidate for
office who is good, if imperfect, makes a good case to vote for him
(Gary Johnson or Ron Paul) than to refrain from voting and let a known evil
entity such as Romney or Obama take office. Gary and Ron both pledged to balance the
budget immediately, not 30 years down the road, and both are strong Second
Amendment advocates. that right there puts them on the opposite pole to the
other two cats, even if they're all statists in the final analysis.

however, the anti-voters shouted me down (figuratively), still implying that my vote was holding a gun
to their heads. I skimmed the top 3 Google hits for "voting is immoral" at Mises Institute, at C4SS, and at LRC, and
saw nothing directly related to these scenarios. the anti-vote literature
is aimed at those using the state as a hammer to pound the "other guys" into
submission to one's pet project or idea. I'm advocating using the vote when
you can damage the system itself. shouting past each other never helps.
if I could free myself from the hour or two of drudgery every year, reading
all the stuff on the absentee ballot and looking to see if any candidates are something
less than evil, I would gladly do so. but I need more reason than "stop pointing a gun at me!", because I'm not. and I'm only interested in things that I can do to make a difference, not in things that I need to convince others to
cooperate with. my vote against a new hammer or to revoke an old one, assuming it's counted (never
a surety) is one of those things.
[comment]

that torch I got the other day for about MXN130, that burns a butane/propane
mix in MXN35 canisters, just couldn't make quite enough heat for brazing. so
today I went out to Home Depot and got a MAPP/Oxy kit for about 10 times as
much, MXN1300 or so. but it works. got my first mirror mount done, now to
finish attaching the mirror and make some more. solar oven, here we come.

just realized where the rest of my carnitas went yesterday morning. left the
back door open when I went upstairs for a shower, and when I came down, a dark
shape slowly walked out. the neighborhood feral cats. they don't steal
everything that isn't nailed down like the neighbor's dog did, but they'll
take every scrap of meat and fat.
[comment]

so the little toy horses at the Soriana mall,
that work on the "inchworm" principle, have
simple U-shaped pieces of wire hanging from
the axle behind each wheel. it catches on
the soft rubber wheel when there's backwards
torque.

that cane I've seen around town and assumed
it was corn: I now believe it's sorghum. just
tasted some.

new strategy for dealing with kahm yeast
infestation of my sourdough: nothing.
doesn't stink up the flavor as with cider,
and doesn't affect the appearance as with
sauerkraut. keep it simple, stupid.
[comment]

just got on 22A and asked; a friendly
mariner told me that a fiber optic cable had
been severed about 5.5 hours ago near Loreto.
it was expected to be repaired in about 6
hours, which means any minute now it may
return. great having alternate modes of
communication!
[comment]

almost noon in La Paz and the town seems to still be pretty much asleep.
a lot of the local (non-tourist) bars were open all night, blaring out
loud techno-beat music. vomit and red plastic cups were in the street about
an hour ago when I got back to the casa. had menudo at the deli down on the
malecon, 55 pesos plus 15 for coffee. not nearly as good as what's available
back in Columbus and Palomas, but not barnyardy either so that's OK by me.

blocked my ex on Facebook. won't be responsible for her bad decisions, and
am not willing to hear about them any more.
[comment]